Madtech: 4 key challenges and solutions for marketers

By Mollie Spilman, chief revenue officer, Oracle Advertising & Marketing

In 2015, analyst David Raab coined the term “madtech” to denote the need to combine martech with adtech because, in his words, “Consumers don’t make a distinction between marketing and advertising interactions. And to meet their expectations, neither can marketers.”

You know the adage that every year a dog lives is equivalent to roughly seven human years? Well, in the digital age I think one year equates to roughly 10 years to reflect how fast things change.

Yet here marketers sit – six years later - still faced with the same challenges they faced all those years ago. As to why this is, it can be summed up in one word: fragmentation.

Here we look at this fragmentation in four separate dimensions, and the challenges and opportunities for marketers when it comes to madtech.

1.) Consumer attention

Challenge: There was a time where there were only 30 cable channels, and in a typical metropolitan area just one or two newspapers, a couple of magazines and a favorite radio station fighting for consumers’ attention. Nowadays, there are more options than ever. This fragmentation of attention was exacerbated during the Covid-19 lockdown last year. As one example, in Q1 2020, Twitter saw the average total of monetizable daily active users increase 23% from the previous year.

Solution: There are two opportunities here. First is truly understanding your audience. The who, what, why and so on. The second is measurement, understanding exactly where to spend your media dollars and measuring the ROI of the spend.

2.) Marketing departments

Challenge: There is one word that best sums up the challenge as it relates to marketing departments: silos. From social media to brand and demand generation teams — all of whom will have siloed financials and KPIs — silos are problematic for any brand. The moment consumers see differing messages across different touchpoints in their journey you can be sure a silo is present.

Solution: Deliver a consistent narrative and story through all touchpoints. To do this, there needs to be a cohesive and coordinated marketing department sitting behind the touchpoints. Moreover, advertising, marketing, planning, execution and measurement need to be integrated.

3.) Technology stacks

Challenge: Late last year, Gartner surveyed nearly 400 marketing technology leaders and found that over one-third of respondents plan to overhaul their martech stacks, while less than 6 in 10 are utilizing their stacks to their full breadth of capabilities. These statistics that have remained unchanged since 2019.

What does this mean for marketers? It means they’ve either reached a tipping point or they recognize — at least they should — the functional gaps that exist within their current stack that preclude them from managing their first and third-party data, as well as other data in an environment with shifting privacy standards, consumer preferences and the deprecation of the cookie.

Solution: Simplify your stacks and focus on technologies that are integrated and support a seamless customer journey, from consideration and adoption all the way through to sales and loyalty. Some companies today are doing just that, bringing together their marketing and advertising tech to drive more qualified sales leads into their CRM systems.

4.) Data

Challenge: A seemingly endless number of media options does not, in and of itself, cause data fragmentation for a company. Naturally it will make it harder to know what messages consumers have been exposed to over time since their identity is disjointed across the various ad tech systems that serve and track the ads across all media types and channels. The real challenge lies in the martech/ad tech stack fragmentations.

Solution: Marketers need to develop an integrated strategy and view of all customer data. For this to work, it’s vital to remove any silos and streamline existing stacks. However, this will be difficult for some since, according to a Deloitte Digital survey, companies today on average have 16 applications that leverage customer data coming from 25 different sources.

We just kicked off

I’m a big Baltimore Ravens fan, so I wanted to use a football analogy to illustrate where I believe we are when it comes to madtech. If madtech were a football game, I would say we just had the opening kickoff.

It’s very early in the madtech “game” for sure. But the good news is the game is underway. The clock has started and the solution providers that deliver on the promise of true ad tech/martech integration will surely be the winners.